


honestly, what's in a name?

by eugenides (newamsterdam)



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 05:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newamsterdam/pseuds/eugenides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>these are the people leonard mccoy loves, and the names they give him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	honestly, what's in a name?

He is six years old and the world seems spread out before him in waves. He tumbles through the grassy Georgia hillside every afternoon and comes home sweaty and content, thick brown hair sticking to his forehead like downy feathers. Often, his father is working late at the hospital. But his mother is always there to greet him, to wipe away the dirt on his cheeks and kiss him on the forehead before sternly ushering him away to wash the grass stains off his knees.

"And don't just use the sonics, Lenny," she calls after him. "Real water."

He does mean to listen to her, really. It's just so much easier to duck under the sonics and have everything--clothes, shoes, himself--cleaned in one go. Betsy McCoy always knows, however. She follows him into the bathroom with a stern look, one eyebrow raised in what would be an incredulous expression if this pattern didn't repeat every evening. He ducks under the sonic shower head but she's too fast, grabbing him around the waist and hoisting him over her shoulder while he squeals out his protests.

"But Mama," he says, even though he knows she's having none of it.

"Lenny," she says sternly, stripping him of shorts and shirt in two fluid motions. "What've I told you about saying 'but' to a lady?"

He mumbles something under his breath, skinny arms crossed over his now bare stomach.

"What was that?" she prompts, in a voice that can be thick like honey or sharp like vinegar.

"You told me not to," he grumbles.

"That's right." And she beams down at her only son, planing another kiss on top of his head before picking him up and dunking him down into the warm water, ready in the free-standing tub. He shrieks as she does, flails his arms and splashes them both with water. Betsy just laughs, soaps him down and scrubs. Her own hair, tumbling over one shoulder in a thick braid, smells of lavender as she uses honeysuckle shampoo on her son's dark locks.

After she rinses him off--and rinses the suds from her arms, which are soaked up to the elbows--she wraps him in a warm, clean bath sheet and picks him up in her arms. He snuggles into her, face tucked against her throat.

"Love you, Mama," he says.

"Love you too, Lenny," she murmurs against his head, arms strong around him.

In a few years the nickname begins to grate, to embarrass. He's small for his age and more scientifically-minded than adventurous, and doesn't see a doting mother as doing him any favors. He insists she call him Leonard, or at the very least just Len. Betsy McCoy, always more shrewd than the men in her family, hears her son's declarations with careful consideration. Then she plants a kiss right between his eyes and continues to call him Lenny. He begins to think she'll keep it at it for the rest of his life. But as it turns out, he has no such luck.

He's twelve years old, not very old at all. He's just become aware enough to hate shuttle crafts, to hate flying in any kind of vehicle. His father scratches his head and wonders how a boy who shows such fierce intelligence can worry so much over something so routine. Betsy tells her husband to stop pestering the boy, slides in next to him on every flight and lets him grip her hand as hard as he needs to.

It's not a very long trip, from Jackson, Mississippi to Atlanta. But as he'll be more than willing to declare, later in life, it only takes a few seconds for something to go wrong.

When the shuttle starts shaking, he grips his mother's hand tighter than usual. She smiles at him placatingly, uses her free hand to rub soothing circles against his back. The shuttle lurches and his vision goes white, and rather than look around him he decides to squeeze his eyes shut and block it all out.

That turns out to be a mistake, because now all he can feel is the erratic and halting motions of the shuttle as something goes wrong with the engines.

He swallows noisily, gasps for air.

"Shush, Lenny," his mother says, and though her son is twelve years old she pulls him close. He buries his face in her lap and tries to only focus on her, on the scent of lavender and honey and the light, steady pressure of her hand on his back.

"I can't--"

"I've got you, Lenny," she says. She keeps repeating his name, soft and calming in his ear. Her voice is all honey, now, with no hint of vinegar. He thinks that, perhaps, he can just melt into her, her scent and feel and sound, and this will all be over quickly.

He's right, about that, but not in the way he expects.

The shuttle crashes just outside Raleigh. His stomach does a gymnastics routine worthy of Olympic gold as he clings to his mother's hand and his father wraps strong arms around both of them as though he can hold the entire world at bay.

The shuttle crushes like a tin can, makes the same sound that vintage pop cans do when he crushes them against the ground under his shoe. Metal and debris cave in on the passengers, some of whom are screaming and others who've gone deathly quiet. They tumble out of the nosedive and, despite seat belts, some of them end up landing hard on hands, elbows and heads.

His father is the first person to move, after everything goes still. He's been a doctor for decades, so of course his instincts kick in as he rises to his feet and assesses the damage. A pregnant woman three rows down has gone into hysterical, premature labor, and it is to her that David McCoy rushes first.

He watches this from beneath his mother's arms, still too terrified to move.

It's a few long minutes later, when the rescue crews have begun to arrive and are prying off the doors of the shuttle, that he looks up and sees the deep gash across his mother's brow, the caved indent near her temple where her head must have slammed against the seat in front of her.

"Mama," he calls out weakly, his voice hoarse from the screams he's been holding in.

"Lenny," she breathes, and there's a smile in her voice. Her grip weakens on his hand, and she sighs with soft content.

"Mama," he cries out, panicked. He shoves his way out of her arms and takes her face in his hands like he's seen his father do with patients countless times. He has neither the skill nor the presence of mind to offer her any help, however. Later, David will tell him that his years of medical experience wouldn't have saved her, either.

"Lenny," his mother starts to say, before her entire body goes slack. He cradles her body in his arms for a long time, after that, tears running down his plump cheeks. David returns to put a bloody hand on his son's shoulder, his own face tight and grim. Behind them, a new mother is still expressing her thanks as a small baby wails in her arms.

He barely hears it. After that, his father never questions his paranoia. He begins to think that all of his fears are justified, because the world can't prove that they aren't.

The funeral is dry and somber, devoid of Betsy's fierce appreciation for life and color. He wears his first adult suit, all black with a white shirt and charcoal tie. Waves of relatives crash down on him, offering condolences and kind words and entirely too many hugs. They all call him Leonard, or David's Boy, or Poor Betsy's Son.

He shrinks away from them, internally curling in on himself. Halfway through the wake he sneaks out of the parlor and into his father's office.

David McCoy is already sitting at his desk, eyes red-rimmed and a half-drained bottle of bourbon in front of him.

"Couldn't stomach it either, could you, Len?" he asks his son quietly, his accent thick with alcohol.

He just shakes his head and lowers himself onto one of the smaller chairs in front of the desk. His father doesn't say anything else, but grabs another glass from the bookshelf behind him and pours out a half-finger of whiskey. He pushes the glass towards his son, who stares at it.

"It'll be okay, Len," his father says, reaching over to clasp him on the shoulder. He nods in response and sips at the bourbon, though it burns his throat and makes his head spin.

A part of him disappears, after that. When he stops to think about it, he realizes that Lenny died along with his mother. But Len is good enough, helps him heal. Len goes with his father on long fishing trips where they sit in companionable silence. Len sits in the corner of his father's office, reading medical texts before he even enters high school. Len goes to David for romantic advice and emotional support, for fights when he needs to work out aggression and for laughs as he begins to grow into the same, sardonic sense of humor.

It's Len who trails after David at the hospital three times a week for years and years, hazel eyes wide as he watches his father work. Sometimes, David can't save a patient. But far more often, he can. It's Len who wants that kind of control over life, the ability to protect and heal and matter.

Len gets into medical school as a young man, and for the first time in years his father pulls him into a hug.

"When do I get to meet her, Len?" David asks one day, via comm. His son's three months away from his MD and can only talk about his neurographting research and a mysterious young woman.

He smiles back, cheeks dimpling as his face grows slightly red. "Soon, Dad, I promise."

David McCoy comes up to Mississippi to watch his son graduate as one of the youngest MDs Ole Miss has ever produced. Len approaches him after the ceremony, flushed with excitement but still too serious for his years. Walking in-step with him is a young woman with curling brown hair and wide green eyes.

"Dad," Len says, hoisting his degree above his head, "This is Pamela."

"Leonard's told me so much about you," she says, smiling and shaking David's hand.

They go out to the steakhouse for dinner, and David calls him Len and Pamela calls him Leonard, except when they're both calling him Doctor McCoy. He thinks having more than one name might not be so bad. In fact, he rather likes it.

He and Pamela have been married for four years when David grows ill. McCoy the younger backs out of his research fellowship at Mississippi and moves back to Georgia, taking over his father's practice and caring for him all the while. Pamela, soft and understanding, buys a horse and comms her friends back home four times a week.

"You're not getting any closer," David says, a year later. He's lying in bed--his own bed, not a generic hospital biobed somewhere--but his hair has gone entirely while and his face is shrunken and aged.

"Dad," his son responds, brow furrowing. "I'm working on it. I'm close."

David shakes his head. "Len," he mutters, though his voice is weak. "I could linger like this for years more. But I'm not gonna get any better. I'm just gonna sink further and further into this pillow until one day you'll come to check the IV and find a pile of dust and bones."

"Dad," Len fairly roars. "Don't talk like that." He adds, under his breath a moment later, "Please."

David lifts a hand, though the effort costs him. "Len, listen to me."

Len listens. Then he turns on his heel and marches from the room, walks the entire way back home to the townhouse he and Pamela have been renting for a year, now.

Back from her evening ride, his wife finds him sprawled out on the floor, head leaning into the arm of the couch. There's a bottle in one of his hands and tumbler in the other. Both are empty.

When she asks him what's wrong, he just mutters the same thing over and over again. "He wants me to, but I can't. I can't."

She leads him quietly to bed, smoothes back his hair and lays quietly beside him. In the morning he wakes up with a headache, but she's laying so peacefully beside him that he can't help but lean in and kiss the knot of her throat.

They make love for the first time in weeks, her slender curves wrapped around him as he holds her flush against him and murmurs softly into her dark curls.

"Leonard, Leonard," she says. "How can I help?"

"Tell me what to do," her husband responds, hopeless and miserable.

"If it's what he wants, Leonard," she says. She never asks what it is that David wants.

But Leonard just nods, leaves a trail of kisses from her neck to her temple before rising slowly from bed and reaching around for a hypo and a vial of hangover cure. He dresses silently, features set in straight lines. When he leaves the townhouse, he looks like a man going to his own execution.

He sits at his father's bedside and the two of them talk quietly for many hours. He comms Pamela once, to tell him he won't be home for dinner, and then again to say he's spending the night. His father pulls him into an embrace a little past three am, plants a kiss on his son's forehead like he hasn't done since Len was a boy.

McCoy the younger changes out the vials hooked to his father's IV, watching David's face all the while. The elder just nods.

They sit together and Len takes both his father's hands in his. He's already crying. David smiles, once.

"Len," he says. "I'm so proud of you. And I'm so sorry."

Len tries to cut him off, but David continues. "Thank you, Len."

Sixty seconds later the heart rate monitor flatlines. He could just be imagining things, but he could swear he hears the machine hiss out his name, mark him with it like a brand. Len is a man who just killed his own father. And so he runs away from being Len.

On the day of David's funeral he wanders into his father's office and smashes fourteen bottles of vintage whiskey against the door, screaming out his rage before Pamela finds him and pulls him away with wide eyes and words that should be soothing but just sound panicked.

Leonard begins to drink, not just after a particularly long shift or to unwind on days off, but continuously. Pamela asks if they're going to move back to Mississippi and he ignores her. He ignores her in a lot of ways, stumbling home at odd hours of the night and sitting out on the porch, ranting at the sky.

Three months after David's death, on one of the rare occasions Leonard is home for dinner, Pamela announces that she's pregnant.

His mouth can't form proper words. "When?" he says eventually. "How?"

She sighs, runs her fingers through her hair. "A few months ago, Leonard. The last time."

He doesn't know what's more tragic: that he hasn't slept with his wife in three months, or the fact that he conceived his own child on the day he committed patricide.

He leaves the house wordlessly, goes to a seedy bar at the edge of town where his patients won't see him and gets so drunk he can't see straight or remember his address well enough to tell the cabbie. He falls asleep in the parking lot, wakes up to the sun the next morning and walks home despite having the worst headache he's ever had.

Pamela is curled up on the couch when he gets there, asleep. Her cheeks are tearstained. Leonard comes up beside her, picks her up in his arms and carries her to bed. She stirs when he plants a kiss against her forehead.

"I'm so sorry," he says. "But I'll fix things."

"Leonard," she murmurs, her tone weary but her eyes lighting with hope.

Leonard and Pamela make things work for a few months, after that. Leonard packs up his parents' house and puts things away in storage, makes sure the place won't fall into disarray. They have Pamela's horse driven back to Mississippi, and in the fall Leonard picks up his research where he left off. Old friends and colleagues come by to offer condolences for David and congratulations on the baby, lingering on the latter and asking about gender and names.

Shifts at the hospital and hours in the lab turn out to be the distraction Leonard's been looking for. Between the two, he barely has to be home. When he thinks about the baby, his stomach clenches with a turbulent mix of emotions. Guilt wracks him, panic eats away at his sanity. But, sometimes, he sees a little girl, with her mother's curls and his big hazel eyes, smiling up at him.

God, he wants her. And Leonard tells himself that that's why he's working so hard, so that when his baby girl is grown she'll have a father she can be proud of and a nice house to live in.

Pamela's happy enough. Pregnancy rounds her out, makes her glow. She's back amongst old friends and her parents are only an hour away. They board her horse at the local stable and she goes riding every chance she can get.

"That might be a mistake," Leonard warns her.

"Don't worry so much, Leonard," she says, kissing his temple as she puts a cup of coffee in his hands. Alcohol has been banned from her home since they made it back to Mississippi. "Your face is going to get stuck in a frown, with that little crease between your eyes."

"I thought you liked that crease," he says, his voice almost teasing. He thinks it'll make her smile. Instead, she frowns.

"It used to be there when you'd laugh," she says quietly.

Leonard can't remember the last time he honestly laughed.

He's finishing up late in the lab one night, putting the final touches on some samples he's submitting as part of the review for his phD. His comm blares from where he's left his things, and he ignores it as he sorts Petri dishes and slides with different cell samples dyed in dark colors. The comm blares again when he's proofreading his hefty thesis. And again as he's finally packing up.

The first two calls are from Pamela. The third is from Jackson General.

It takes him twenty minutes to get to the hospital. An orderly guides him to Pamela's bed, where she's lying with her eyes closed. Her face is remarkably bloodless, her hair lank against the plump white pillows.

Leonard reaches down to take her hand, and she leans away from him without opening her eyes.

"Where were you, Leonard?" she says in a hollow voice.

He's heard the story, by now. How she'd felt ill after riding, but hadn't thought anything of it. How the blood had only come once she'd reached home, collapsed in the doorway. How she'd called for him, screaming his name.

"I'm sorry," he says. She doesn't look at him.

Losing the baby drains what life and love was left between them. Pamela isn't in the hospital for very long, but once she's back their home still feels empty. She barely speaks to him, and he avoids her.

They sleep in the same bed, but each of them presses up against an opposite edge and they face the walls instead of each other.

"I don't know if I can keep doing this, Leonard," she says one day, after he's missed dinner for the fourth night in a row.

"I," he begins. "I know. I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing," she snaps. "I don't want you to apologize."

"What else am I supposed to do?" He demands. "You think I don't know? You think I don't know this is my fault? That I've fucked up just about everything?"

"It's not just you," she says, trying to cut him off, but he's too far gone.

"I know it's my fault," he roars. "I couldn't save anyone that matters, I know that. They discovered the god damn cure for my dad two months after I murdered him! And I couldn't do anything for my own kid. I'm sorry I'm just a doctor, not some kind of miracle worker!"

Pamela's on her feet, eyes bright with tears and anger. "Shut up. Just shut up, Leonard. It's not all about you. Things don't happen because you did or didn't stop them, they just happen! And if you'd get your head out of your ass for three seconds you'd see that."

He blinks, stares at her. "Then I wish the entire world would stop trying to convince me that it revolves around my unhappiness."

Pamela lets out a sigh. "Maybe it's not the world, Leonard. Maybe it's you. Maybe you're just not fit for life on this planet."

Leonard doesn't know what to say to that, because he thinks it must be true.

In May he's awarded his phD and sinks all his time into clinical trials and patient care. In June Pamela moves back in with her parents, and in July she serves him divorce papers through her lawyer.

At the hospital everyone calls him Doctor McCoy. Pamela takes just about everything in the divorce, including most of their friends. In the end, there's no one left who calls him just Leonard.

Guilt eats away at him, claws its way into his skull and stomach and eats him from the inside out. On the day the divorce is finalized he walks into the hospital and quits. He's lost the apartment, most of his savings, his friends and his family. He can't stomach being at the same job, haunted by reminders.

He spends three weeks drinking his way into the Midwest. He ignores the five emails and sixteen comms he gets from Starfleet.

Until the day he doesn't.

"There's a shuttle of new recruits leaving from Iowa in two days," the captain he talks to--Pine? Park? Pike?--tells him with steady calm. He pretends not to notice Leonard's unshaven face and red-rimmed eyes. "If you can be on it, there's a place for you here."

He ends the conversation already calling Leonard Cadet McCoy, even though the doctor never agreed to enlist.

He's drunk off his ass and panicky to boot when he gets onto the shuttle. He barely remembers half of what he says and what's said to him, although when a female officer yells him down it's all he can do not to bolt, because her voice reminds him so much of Pamela and the last time he saw her.

He throws himself down into a seat and tries not to think about the fact that this is probably only going to be the second-worst shuttle ride of his life.

There's a kid next to him with bright blue eyes and a bloody face. The doctor introduces himself as Leonard McCoy, even though he's not really sure which names belong to him anymore.

And the kid, as if sensing that, decides to give him a name all his own.

Jim Kirk blazes into Bones' life with singular purpose. When Bones spends too many hours at the clinic, Jim is there to drag him off for a proper meal. When Bones wants to get drunk, Jim is there to see him home safely afterwards. When Bones gets too drunk, and talky, Jim sits quietly beside him and listens to stories about his mother, and secrets about his father, and confessions about his wife.

Once, he even listens as Bones tells him he almost had a daughter.

If it had been just that, Bones wouldn't have been able to stomach it. But Jim takes as much as he gives. He arrives at Bones' room at all hours of the night, his face a bruised mess even as he smiles apologetically. Bones cleans him up, heals his cuts and makes sure his pretty face doesn't scar. When Jim needs an ear for his hair-brained--and yes, they always are hair-brained--schemes, Bones is his gruff and unapologetic sounding board. And on Remembrance Day, when Jim needs to get drunk and forget, Bones lays on the beach with him and stares at the stars as they both takes swigs of the same bottle and Jim reminds them both what they're here for.

The first time Jim shows up at his room at three am and isn't an injured, broken mess, Bones just stares at him for a moment. Jim's smiling almost apologetically--except, no, Bones amends, Jim never apologizes for anything. But it's a genuine, honest look and there's a spark in those blue eyes that tells Bones that Jim isn't exactly sure why he's there, sober and uninjured, but he's glad that he is.

At that point, Bones just has to pull him roughly through the door, take Jim's shoulders under his own steady hands and push him against the door as it closes. The doctor stares at his best friend for a long moment, and then he presses their lips together and tastes the other man--pine, and oil from engineering classes, and the staleness that comes from sonic showers.

Jim Kirk also tastes like starlight, which is a stupidly sentimental and falsely poetic thing to think when you're kissing someone. But Bones thinks it, anyway.

"Bones," Jim murmurs, after they break apart. His steady fingers find Bones' thick hair, card through it idly as Bones sets his forehead against Jim's shoulder and neck and breathes him in slowly and steadily.

And that's it, really.

Only Jim ever calls him Bones. With everyone else it's Cadet, Doctor, or just McCoy. But somehow he starts thinking of himself that way, all the same.

They go up into space together and Jim becomes Captain and Bones becomes CMO. Their positions are born of death and destruction, their circle of trust thrust open by force. Spock becomes Jim's confidante, Bones and Uhura get along better on the ship than they ever did back at the academy. Sulu and Jim talk flight and reckless stunts, and when they do more than talk Bones puts them both back together and gives them both lectures that leave their ears ringing. Bones and Scotty and Jim test out each new batch of engineering moonshine over cards and old stories. Chekov and Bones play chess, regularly, and Bones says that if the kid can beat either Jim or Spock one day, all the defeats he's suffered will be worth it.

On duty, Jim calls him Doctor McCoy just like everyone else, at least on official comm lines and on digital forms.

But when he comes onto the bridge and stands behind Jim's chair, the captain turns to look at him, pointing out stars and nebulas and planets on the view screen and asking, "Isn't it beautiful, Bones?"

When they're both off-duty, they take advantage of Jim's slightly-bigger-than-regulation Captain's quarters. Jim will bowl Bones over onto his bed, climb up on top of him and storm his mouth with affectionate aggression. Bones will dig his fingers into Jim's blonde hair, hold on for all he's worth while Jim explores every inch of him with his tongue.

Their nights together are burst of energy punctuating slow moments of lying in each other's arms, murmuring jokes and endearments between them.

They don't give a name to what it is, between them. For Bones the one name he's gotten from Jim is enough. It's an anchor, chaining him to one identity. As Bones he's the ship's doctor, the captain's best friend, the most talented physician in the Federation. He may be called Doctor McCoy or Lieutenant Commander, but it's Bones who achieves greatness at Jim Kirk's side.

The two weeks after Khan and Kronos are painfully, eerily silent. He moves like a ghost through the halls of Starfleet Medical, dressed in white with a PADD of research under his arm as he takes brisk steps towards his patient's room.

He receives curt nods of respect, awed looks and a few salutes from the rest of the medical staff. There's always a crew member or two from the Enterprise waiting outside Kirk's room, keeping vigil. They'll greet him as Doctor McCoy, or just McCoy, or Leonard, if it happens to be Uhura or Carol, which it is much of the time.

He nods at them in an empty way, barely registering that it's him they're talking to.

Inside, Jim Kirk lies on a biobed that gives off steady and frustrating readings. The serum--developed within days of the captain's death, pushed into his body without trial or permission--has done its work. Ninety-eight percent of Jim's cells have been reproduced in the past two weeks, his body functioning perfectly. It's as though he never doused himself with radiation, playing at being a big damn hero.

Bones wonders, many times, during those two weeks. He wonders if Jim felt the ship starting to go down and thought of the doctor, busy in sickbay but feeling every lurch of the Enterprise around him. Jim must have known, must have thought about him, went to save the whole crew with Bones' warnings about disease and danger and darkness and silence ringing in his ears.

All his paranoias come true. He's always known it. He predicts the ship crashing, and it nearly does. He berates Jim Kirk for his recklessness and inability to keep himself in one piece, and what does the man do? He goes and gets himself killed.

Goddamn.

No one's called him "Bones" in two weeks, and he's starting to forget who he is.

He wonders why he didn't see this coming, why he didn't realize that as soon as he grows into a new name, he loses it.

He doesn't actually lose names. Just the people who give them to him. Or maybe it's the same thing.

And then, quickly as it started, it's over. Jim opens his eyes and smiles at him, and they're joking before the doctor has time to release a breath. It's better that way, he decides. He doesn't want too much time to dwell.

Too many people have demands on Jim's time for the two of them to be alone much, after that. If it isn't admirals from intelligence with debriefings, or hearings for the posthumous dishonorable discharge of certain higher-ups, it's the visits from Spock, who never leaves Jim's side except when he has to. Or Sulu and Chekov, showing up to entertain on the days that Jim is still confined to his room in medical. Or Uhura, who comes with Spock or without him. Or Carol, or Scotty...

The list goes on. Bones stands by the walls, or the monitors, keeping close watch over Jim without demanding his attention. He can wait.

When an admiral leaves, on the third day after Jim's woken up, the captain turns to his friend and flashes him a brash smile. "You're a trooper, Bones, sitting through all this."

Bones thinks he'd sit through a different admiral spewing political bullshit every hour of the day, if it meant that Jim was still alive and well and calling his name.

A week later, Jim is released. Scotty and Sulu organize a welcome back party at Sulu's apartment--Spock's currently in the process of moving in with Uhura, and Scotty's place was lost when the Vengeance crashed. Sulu's place is open, modern, with plants just about everywhere and a stocked liquor cabinet underneath the display of antique swords.

It's a small gathering, just command crew and the closer members of the staff. There'll be time for bigger celebrations later, once they've all gotten back on their feet.

Bones sits through the party, talks to everyone but never gets further than ten feet from Jim. He nurses just one glass of whiskey the whole night. For some reason, he doesn't feel like getting drunk.

It's close to three am when he and Jim set out, Bones insisting on getting him back to his own apartment. They walk slowly down San Francisco's quiet streets, the city still subdued after the catastrophe of three weeks prior.

Just before they can turn onto Jim's street, the captain turns to Bones and cants his head. "What's with you, tonight?"

"Huh?" An eloquent response, to be sure, but he hadn't even been expecting the question.

Jim raps his knuckles against Bones' skull. "You're thinking too much, aren't you? You've gone all quiet and you're probably lost inside your own head."

Bones pushes Jim's hand away, huffing with irritation "Shut up."

"Come on," Jim laughs. "Just tell me what's up."

Bones doesn't respond, for a moment.

"Bo-ones," Jim pouts, turns the nickname into as many syllables as he possibly can. Bones jerks his head up, looks at Jim with blazing eyes. The next second, he's got one hand in Jim's hair and another around the back of his neck. He smashes their lips together without preamble or thought, his tongue sloppily invading Jim's mouth. Jim doesn't seem to mind, leans in and fumbles his hands over Bones' chest with a similar lack of grace.

After a moment Bones pulls away, shifts his hands from Jim's head down to his hips. He leans his head heavily against Jim's collarbone. The air is cool around them as Bones breathes in, deeply. Pine and stardust.

Jim curls his his hands around Bones, placing them gently over his shoulders. The two men stand like that for a long moment, until Jim asks, casually, "Bones?"

"Jim," Bones says, though he's still got his head buried against his friend's neck and can't look him in the eyes, "Never stop saying my name."

He doesn't need to see Jim to know he's smiling.

"I won't, Bones," Jim promises, and when he says Bones' name the doctor can feel the word, starting in Jim's chest and then bouncing around in his throat, leaving through lips that aren't as flushed from kissing as they will be in a few moments.

Bones takes that promise and that name and holds them close to his chest. He smiles, and lifts his head to look Jim straight in the eye. Jim's still smiling back, and after a moment the captain leans in until their foreheads are resting against one another.

"Bones," he says, and then he kisses him, so that Bones can feel his name on Jim's lips and then his own. He leans in and the air is cold because he's in San Francisco, not Georgia, and he's on the ground and the Enterprise won't be ready for space for another ten months. But even so, when Jim says his name, Bones feels like he's home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> amalgamating bones' past from different sources is always fun and a bit of a challenge; in this case i decided to go with official movie-verse canon for certain names (pamela rather than jocelyn, betsy) but picked and chose aspects from prime canon as they worked. 
> 
> recommended listening includes "when you find me" by joshua radin and maria taylor, "comes and goes (in waves)" by greg laswell, and "what's in a name?" by the airborne toxic event.


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